However, from the prequels we now know that the Clone Wars ended only nineteen years before ANH. All the dates in Heir are therefore off by those sixteen years.
Personally, I put it down to the chaos of information loss during the Empire, and sloppy work on the part of post-Empire historians. These things happen …
—TZ
Chapter 10
1 Slipping someone’s name and/or personal characteristics into a book Is sometimes called Tuckerizing, after Wilson “Bob” Tucker, who did a lot of it throughout his writing career.
Normally, I do this in connection with charity auctions, where I auction off a walk-on role to the highest bidder. But sometimes, it’s just for fun. In Heir, I slipped in several friends, many from the Tampa-area Necronomicon convention, others just random friends as happened to occur to me.
This one is an Illinois friend named Don Vandersluis. If I remember, I’ll point out some of the others as we go along.
—TZ
2 In fact, as we all know, Luke knew about the torture before it actually happened. But under the circumstances Leia may have been a little fuzzy on the details.
Luke may also have fudged those same details a bit to keep Leia and the others from knowing how far away he’d been. Later, we’ll learn that he’s still keeping Dagobah’s significance a secret.
—TZ
3 Another Tuckerization: Mark Jones of Tampa. Fortunately, Mark never took offense that Jomark was only a minor world.
—TZ
4 In various sources this weapon is identified as a “Taim & Bak auto blaster cannon,” a “BlasTech Ax-108 ‘Ground Buzzer’ surface-defense blaster cannon,” and simply as “concealed blaster cannon.”
I figure that my term, underside swivel blaster, is probably a generic term for all such handy gadgets.
—TZ
5 The West End Games material gave me the model designation for the Falcon. Unfortunately, it didn’t mention that the ships were pretty common throughout the galaxy. Ergo, digging one up wouldn’t have been nearly as hard as Han implied here.
Probably what Han meant wasn’t that they’d found another YT-1300, but that they’d found one with the same quirks and add-ons as the Falcon. Sure—that’s what he meant.
—TZ
6 A couple of weeks after I finished Heir and sent it in, my editor, Betsy Mitchell, called to chat about the manuscript. In the course of the conversation she asked if I liked Han best of all the movie characters.
I assured her that I liked them all, and asked why she would think I liked Han best. She said, “Because you gave him all the best lines.”
She may have been right. But in all fairness, as far as giving Han good lines is concerned, George got there a long time before I did.
—TZ
7 Like Rogue Squadron, Page was another mostly background character whom other authors later picked up and ran with.
Ran with in both directions, in fact, as he was retroactively added into the Rebellion era.
Or at least his name was. There were certainly Rebel commandos running around making trouble for Palpatine’s Empire—it was only after Heir was published that Page was associated by name with some of those operations.
—TZ
8 Again, a word that echoes a familiar term—hacker—but is different enough to fit comfortably into the Star Wars universe.
—TZ
Chapter 11
1 Luke’s actually wrong here—Yoda couldn’t have affected his X-wing’s systems at that distance. (Otherwise, Ben wouldn’t have had to physically go to the tractor beam station on the Death Star.)
But Yoda could have affected Luke’s perception at the critical time.
—TZ
2 I’d always been a little confused about this. In The Empire Strikes Back, it appears that Luke is going into a cave; yet on the soundtrack that scene is listed as “The Magic Tree.”
Fortunately, I was able to work the description so that I could sort of have it both ways.
—TZ
3 Depending on the motivation and the object of the curiosity, I suspect it can serve either side.
—TZ
4 One of the challenges I faced was to find a way to describe R2-D2’s sounds without having Skywalker Sound to draw on.
I also didn’t want to simply say “he beeped” every time he said something, since that could get boring. So I made up a small note card with alternatives and kept it handy.
Hence, at various spots throughout the book, Artoo warbles, chirps, twitters, grunts, gurgles, jabbers, beeps, and probably a few others that I’ve forgotten.
Amazing what an hour with a thesaurus can accomplish.
—TZ
5 One of the rules of fantasy and SF writing (and of mysteries, for that matter) is to make sure to give the readers all the bits and pieces of information that you’ll be using later—it’s unfair to suddenly spring something on them just when you need it to get out of the corner you’ve painted yourself into.
Nearly every reader will remember that Luke has a mechanical right hand, and most will assume I’m just putting this in as another link to the movies. But of course, it’s also going to turn out to be very important down the road.…
—TZ
6 Another Tuckerism: longtime Athens, Georgia, fan Klon Newell, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of my original Cobra series way back in the eighties.
—TZ
Chapter 12
1 There apparently is no paper in the Star Wars universe, so the term paper pusher is again one of those that needs a little tweaking.
—TZ
2 One of my all-time favorite movie examples of How To Do Technology Right is from A New Hope. During the escape from the Death Star, Han and Luke head up and down to the quad lasers. However, by the time they arrive at the gun wells, gravity has turned ninety degrees, which is what allows them to comfortably sit in the gunner seats facing up and down for firing.
This is exactly the way people do things in the real world: if you have gravity plates (or whatever), you adjust and position them to get things arranged the way you want them to be. People do that with pretty much any technology.
It’s completely and properly underplayed in the movie, of course. After all, Luke and Han are used to things working this way, so they wouldn’t comment on it.
But having appreciated that little touch of cleverness back when the movie came out, I wanted to remind the readers about it here.
—TZ
3 One of the great and satisfying aspects of Star Wars is that no one is deadweight. All of the characters have their chance to shine, to come up with the clever way to think or fight their way out of whatever predicament they happen to be in at the moment.
Maintaining that balance was yet another of the challenges—and fun parts—of writing Heir.
—TZ
4 Another Tuckerism: the Stonehill Science Fiction Club of Tampa, which puts on the Necronomicon convention every October.
—TZ
5 Before he became a full-time novelist, Tim was a grad student shooting for a PhD in physics. Here is just one place where he brings his science background into play. Checking for breathable air is always a good idea before jumping out of your ship on a strange planet.
—BM
6 Bestselling writers often use the literary device of the cliffhanger to grip readers. How many times have you stayed up far too late at night because something enthralling happens at the end of a chapter and you simply have to find out what happens next? Tim brings the use of the cliffhanger to a high art in Heir. I defy anyone to put this book down after a closing line like Leia’s.